Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner

Bad behavior'Folly and misfortune' describe history of CIA, reporter says

STEVE WEINBERG

Published 5:30 am, Sunday, July 8, 2007

Photo: ROGER RESSMEYER, CORBIS

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Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Weiner, a reporter for the New York Times, has written about American intelligence agencies for 20 years.

Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Weiner, a reporter for the New York Times, has written about American intelligence agencies for 20 years.

Photo: ROGER RESSMEYER, CORBIS

Legacy of Ashes by Tim Weiner

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From its founding after World War II the CIA sometimes considered "eliminating" those considered a threat to U.S. national security. But in 1975 it looked as if the agency itself might face elimination as news of its dirty operations and information-gathering failures began leaking out to the public.

With Gerald Ford as a caretaker president after the impeachment of Richard M. Nixon, an era of clean (or cleaner) government seemed possible. Ford jettisoned William Colby as CIA director and asked a Texan, George H.W. Bush, to assume the job.

As author Tim Weiner notes in his new book, "It was on its face a strange choice. Bush was not a general, an admiral or a spy. He knew almost nothing about intelligence. He was a politician pure and simple." At that juncture, Bush had served two terms in the House of Representatives, failed twice to win a Senate seat, served the tainted Nixon administration as ambassador to the United Nations and head of the Republican National Committee, then served the Ford administration as ambassador to China.

Still an ambitious politician, Bush saw the CIA appointment as a political dead end but said yes, apparently from a sense of duty. He ended up enjoying the challenge, as well as the international intrigue. According to Weiner, Bush improved morale within the agency and helped save it from terminal disgrace.

But like CIA directors before and after, Bush failed to produce first-rate information to help the United States find its way in a dangerous world. Weiner documents convincingly Bush's operational failures, while acknowledging Bush's skill in unexpectedly rebuilding his political base from agency headquarters. The section about the George H.W. Bush CIA is characteristically fascinating in a book that constitutes the best of many I have read about the agency.

Top-notch journalists like Weiner of the New York Times are often so busy writing about what happened today — in 1,000 words or fewer — that they cannot devote their talent to placing those deadline stories in context.

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Fortunately, Weiner has stepped back from his daily coverage of government intelligence agencies to look at the big picture. When Weiner did that previously, for a book about defense spending mishandled by the Pentagon, he gave readers a searing portrait of a weapons establishment out of control as it wasted taxpayer dollars on ineffective tools of war.

With Legacy of Ashes, Weiner punctures claims by the spymasters at the CIA that they have stopped enemy threats and otherwise served their nation well. Most importantly, Weiner has based his exposé on 60 years of CIA internal documents, obtained legally through perseverance, so that nobody within the agency can argue that he is biased.

In fact, Weiner believes fervently in the importance of an effective spy agency, and thus presents his exposé in the spirit of building up, rather than tearing down. He says the CIA's ineptness "constitutes a danger to the national security of the United States."

In fairness, Weiner documents the positive, what he calls "acts of bravery and cunning." But the CIA's own documents provide a saga of "folly and misfortune," causing Weiner's exposé to feel both devastating and depressing. Only the most xenophobic patriots will be able to finish this massively documented book without a sense of shame for the bad behavior of a U.S. bureaucracy on the global stage and a sense of anger at the misuse of resources.

The consequences are not abstract. Weiner says CIA mistakes "have proved fatal for legions of American soldiers and foreign agents; some 3,000 Americans who died in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001; and 3,000 more who have died since then in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Before World War II, the United States stood as the only world power without a long history of spying on alleged international enemies. A hastily pulled together group of men and women labored mightily during World War II but received little incentive to remain after peace returned.

During the late 1940s, as the legislative and executive branches of government negotiated to form what became the CIA, a few wise observers predicted problems. For example, how could spies spread throughout the world and analysts headquartered in Washington, D.C., understand other cultures without speaking their non-English languages? How could operatives learn covert action in a laboratory, without practiced trainers? How could presidents like Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy develop channels within the White House to detect the lies told by CIA officials to cover up their failures?

On the other end of the information pipeline, how could CIA agents with useful information persuade presidents to act on reports that stood in the way of political ambition? Weiner demonstrates over and over how CIA officials "learned it was dangerous to tell [a president] what he did not want to hear. The CIA's analysts learned to march in lockstep, conforming to conventional wisdom."

As a result, Weiner says, the agency "misapprehended the intentions and capabilities of our enemies, miscalculated the strength of communism and misjudged the threat of terrorism." An agency created to ensure that the U.S. government would never again suffer a surprise like Pearl Harbor unwittingly led to lots more Pearl Harbors.

Weiner brings the history to the present day, criticizing George W. Bush for compromising any remaining shred of credibility at an agency once directed by his own father.

Readers will be able to choose their own "greatest hits" from the huge number of CIA misadventures Weiner documents. One suggestion to those readers: Read Weiner's 154 pages of endnotes along with the text. The endnotes do not consist merely of citations. Many are narratives, explaining the documents upon which Weiner relies; they add both substance and color to the main text.

Legacy of Ashes is recent history at its best, and its most dismaying.

Steve Weinberg, a former Washington correspondent for newspapers and magazines, has practiced investigative reporting for 40 years.